The Gun Industry Knows That Gun Laws Save Lives. It Just Doesn’t Care.
A series of articles by The Trace and Rolling Stone dive deep into the gun industry’s sacrifice of public safety in its pursuit of profit.
Last year, investigative journalist Mike Spies published an extraordinary series of articles about how the firearm industry operates—and the lies it tells to juice gun sales.
Called “The Secret Files of the Gun Industry” and published in partnership with The Trace and Rolling Stone, this reporting should’ve shaken the industry to its core. But gun industry CEOs have a tendency to get away with dangerous and questionable behavior, so they ran their usual playbook and rode out the crisis until the news cycle moved on.
But we didn’t forget, and we’re not letting anyone else move on either. The documents Spies uncovered illuminate a persistent dynamic in American gun politics: What the gun industry privately knows is very different from what it says publicly.
Gun Industry Polling Reveals Americans Support Gun Laws
Now, this probably isn’t very surprising. But consider the market for large-capacity magazines, which are magazines with the capacity to hold 10 or more rounds. They’re often used in mass shootings because they allow a shooter to fire a lot of rounds before stopping or pausing to reload, in turn increasing casualties and reducing the likelihood of escape or intervention.
Internal industry analyses show how carefully gun companies tracked the proliferation of large-capacity magazines in the US, and how commercially important these deadly devices are to them. After all, they’re high-volume and relatively inexpensive—the gun industry is making millions from them.
The article also illustrates just how dangerous large-capacity magazines are in practice, despite protests from the gun lobby:
“The NSSF’s claim [that any capacity-based ban on the manufacture and sale of magazines would be arbitrary and infringe upon Second Amendment rights], according to research by economist Lucy Allen, lacks empirical support. For litigation, she and a team analyzed 736 incidents, between January 2011 and May 2017, in which the National Rifle Association documented a person using a firearm for self-defense… Her analysis found that the people in the database fired 2.2 shots on average, and out of the 736 total incidents, only two involved a person reportedly firing more than 10 bullets.
Allen also documented and examined 161 mass shootings that took place between 1982 and 2019. For 105 of them, the shooter’s magazine capacity was known. Of those, 63 — or 60 percent — involved LCMs. ‘In particular,’ Allen noted, ‘we found an average number of fatalities or injuries of 27 per mass shooting with a large-capacity magazine versus 9 for those without.”
While the industry has long resisted regulations targeting large-capacity magazines, after the 2018 Parkland school shooting, the National Shooting Sports Foundation commissioned research examining Americans’ attitudes toward gun policy. The results complicate one of the most familiar talking points in gun politics.
According to the industry’s own polling, many Americans who hold favorable views of gun ownership, including gun owners themselves, are open to supporting gun regulations. That is very different from industry portrayals of gun owners as a bloc uniformly opposed to any gun law, no matter how commonsense the laws may be:
“Why have Republican lawmakers largely stood against more significant reforms, let alone any reform at all? As the study indicates, many people with a favorable view of gun ownership appear open to going further than the lawmakers and special interests who represent them.
[…]
For people who the study says have a ‘positive feeling’ about gun ownership, the study ranks the top five arguments for and against it… When told to rank the ‘most effective arguments against firearm ownership,’ these same respondents chose policies that the gun industry and Republican lawmakers actively oppose. The argument the group found to be most effective is: ‘Universal background checks for gun sales and transactions are supported by approximately 85 percent of Americans.’
Other statements deemed highly effective by these respondents included ‘Guns should be licensed just like cars,’ ‘State red flag laws to remove guns from those who show warning signs of violence keep guns out of the hands of those who would harm themselves or others,’ ‘Gun violence is an epidemic in the U.S.,’ and ‘Common sense gun laws to close loopholes in current gun laws will save lives and prevent gun violence.’
And yet, since this survey was conducted, Republicans have blocked efforts to pass universal background checks, which would expand the procedure to all firearms transfers instead of just commercial sales.”
Minimal Support for Concealed Carry
Internal studies reviewed by Spies also shed light on the debate over concealed carry. If the gun lobby had its way, anyone would be able to carry a concealed gun on them anywhere, regardless of local laws.
Gun rights advocates frequently argue that widespread concealed carrying of firearms increases public safety and deters crime. But in the industry-funded research that Spies uncovered, many respondents reported feeling less safe when they believed people around them might be carrying concealed firearms. This lines up with the data: The more guns are in public, the higher likelihood of lethal violence.
A Focus on Extremist Marketing
A chilling part of the series sheds light on gun marketing and its role in fueling violent extremism. Internal research identifies a core consumer demographic for the gun industry: frequent firearm purchasers whose motivations often center on personal protection, preparedness, and perceived threats to social order. As one article explains:
“The NSSF’s research also showed that first-time buyers do not account for the bulk of industry profits, comprising less than 23 percent of sales in 2022, a figure consistent with the years before the pandemic surge. That means once the gun industry brings a customer in, it must keep him, a task that requires not only the selling of guns, but also the culture and politics of gun ownership. What makes white men in particular susceptible to this messaging is a matter of academic study. The sociologist Jennifer Carlson, a professor at Arizona State University, introduced the concept of the ‘citizen protector,’ a man who experiences a sense of dislocation in today’s America. He may be struggling economically, or feel he’s not succeeding as a provider or a contributing member of the broader society. Deprived of a traditional masculine role, these men reimagine themselves as soldiers on the front lines, an honorable identity that bestows power.”
That’s why marketing campaigns for guns and gun-related products frequently draw on those themes, emphasizing danger, instability, and confrontation. These narratives fuel paranoia and extremism, and glorify combat. And for the businesses, they’re successful—these campaigns are very effective at selling guns, even if they do so while driving up crime and violence.
Safety Must Come First, Not Profits
The documents Spies unearthed provide an unusually detailed portrait of an industry that has long operated with limited public scrutiny. They show a sophisticated ecosystem of market research, political strategy, and consumer targeting.
For policymakers, journalists, and advocates trying to understand the dynamics of gun violence in America, that insight matters. The story of gun violence is as much about how guns are sold as it is about how they are fired, and to end gun violence we must understand the industry that works relentlessly to sell as many as possible.
=============================================== Gee whiz the Gun Industry wants to make money! What a shocking observation! Kinda like this author wants a pay check. Huh, now who would of guessed that one? Grumpy
The M1 Abrams was conceived with a singular, unyielding purpose: the total destruction of enemy armored formations. Over the last four decades, it has become the absolute pinnacle of tank warfare made manifest.
Its sheer battlefield dominance has not only won conflicts, but forced militaries across the globe to fundamentally rewrite their combat doctrines when it comes to both employing and defending against armored units.
From spearheading the rapid collapse of the Iraqi regime in the famous “Battle of 73 Easting” to maintaining overmatch and superiority in all manner of theaters worldwide, the Abrams has spent generations striking fear into the enemies of the Free World. As a tank crewman who has served on every position of the M1 Abrams in the U.S. Army, let me be the first to tell you: that fear is well-deserved.
While there have been many changes since the first 105mm M1 rolled off of the assembly line, its core identity remains exactly the same. Its familiar silhouette hasn’t changed much over the decades, but that familiarity should not be mistaken for stagnation. The current iteration, the M1A2 SEPv3, proves the platform’s enduring supremacy.
Make no mistake: underneath that recognizable steel carapace lies a heavily upgraded, cutting-edge war machine that remains the pinnacle of armored technology, lethality, and protection available anywhere in the world.
Genesis & Evolution
Born from the ashes of a failed U.S./West German joint venture in the 1960’s, the United States eventually realized it needed its own independent, uncompromising design to hold the Fulda Gap against any Soviet incursions into the rest of Europe. The result of this realization was the M1 Abrams. Entering service in the 1980s with a 105mm rifled gun, it was a war machine purpose built for what is referred today as Large Scale Combat Operations (LSCO).
As the threat evolved, so did the Abrams. The first step of that evolution was the M1A1. This model introduced the much more powerful 120mm smoothbore cannon that is still used today. This power was demonstrated to the world firsthand during Operation Desert Storm.
Riding high off of the positive waves of absolute victory from Desert Storm, the M1A1 gave birth to the M1A2, which ushered in the digital age of armored warfare. Advanced fire control networks and independent thermal sights for both the tank commander and the gunner are now staples in the armored community, but they were cutting edge and game changing at the time.
During the Global War on Terror, the Abrams was forced to change its identity. Gone were the days of facing down enemy tank battalions.
Now was the time of counterinsurgency (COIN) and urban warfare. Upgrade kits like the Tank Urban Survival Kit (TUSK) and System Enhancement Packages (SEP) facilitated that evolution and allowed the Abrams to adjust as needed to the mission at hand.
However, times and missions have changed once again: COIN is out and LSCO is back in. The M1A2 SEPv3 showcases a definitive return to the Abrams original mission and purpose: complete domination over near-peer adversaries on the battlefield.
Upgraded with enhanced power generation, an Ammo Data Link (ADL) with programmable munitions, and reinforced armor capable of defeating modern anti-tank guided missiles, the SEPv3 ensures the Abrams remains the apex predator in the conventional battle space.
Lethality and Firepower
The first thing any apex predator is judged by is the size of its teeth, and the Abrams possesses some of the sharpest teeth in the game. The combat-proven 120mm M256 smoothbore cannon strikes fear into enemy armor commanders worldwide, and for good reason. The SEPv3 pairs that cannon with an upgraded Fire Control System (FCS) with state-of-the-art, third-generation Forward Looking Infrared (FLIR) day and night optics for both the gunner and tank commander.
This enables true “hunter-killer” capability, allowing the commander to scan for new targets while the gunner engages the current one. The tank can carry up to 43 main gun rounds: 18 in the ready rack behind a mechanized blast door, 18 in the semi ready rack, six in hull storage, and one battle-carried in the tube.
Not every target is going to require a 120mm sized one-way-ticket to hell, so that’s where our secondary armament comes in. A 7.62mm M240 coaxial machine gun sits right next to the main gun, supported by an immense 11,400-round combat load.
The loader’s station features a skate-mounted M240, while the commander operates a .50-cal. machine gun mounted on a Low Profile Common Remotely Operated Weapon Station (CROWS-LP). The CROWS-LP is a massive upgrade for crew survivability, allowing the commander to accurately fire the machine gun using a joystick and screen from the safety of the turret interior.
Armor & Survivability
The SEPv3 features the latest generation of depleted uranium composite armor, offering unparalleled kinetic and chemical energy protection. However, the most significant survivability upgrade against modern threats is the integration of the Trophy Active Protective System, more commonly referred to as the “trophy system”.
The trophy system utilizes radar arrays mounted to the exterior of the tank to detect incoming Anti-Tank Guided Missiles (ATGMs) and rocket-propelled grenades, automatically launching a counter-measure to intercept and destroy the projectile before it impacts the vehicle.
Communications
While the internal networking isn’t the most glamorous aspect of the tank, it is absolutely critical for modern maneuver warfare. The SEPv3 completely overhauls the tank’s digital architecture. It builds upon the situational awareness provided by Joint Battle Command-Platform (JBC-P), allowing the crew to track friendly and enemy forces in real-time on digital maps.
The physical integration of these systems is streamlined through Remote Switching Modules (RSMs), which efficiently distribute power and data across the platform, eliminating the need to completely gut and rewire the tank for future upgrades.
Mobility and Power Generation
The SEPv3 is propelled by the iconic Honeywell AGT1500 gas turbine engine.
Delivering 1,500 horsepower, it can push the tank to a listed top speed of 42mph on paved roads (however I can neither confirm nor deny having gotten one to over 60mph going down a massive hill at Fort Benning as a Private). Keep in mind, this vehicle weighs more than 70 tons.
To support the massive electrical draw of these new systems, optics and networking devices without constantly running the turbine engine, the SEPv3 comes with a factory installed Auxiliary Power Unit (APU). Older model tanks had after-the-fact APUs mounted in the exterior bustle racks of the turret, but this took up valuable storage space and left it vulnerable to enemy fire. This new APU is co-located with the turbine engine in the hull of the tank, giving it valuable armored protection. The APU allows the crew to run all electronic systems in a silent watch mode while preserving main engine fuel and minimizing the tank’s thermal and acoustic signatures.
Peer Comparison
When stack ranking the SEPv3 against the rest of the world, the dividing line ultimately comes down to doctrine. Eastern designs tend to favor a smaller silhouette and lower weight, while Western designs prioritize crew survivability and sustained fighting capability.
The Adversaries
Russia’s T-90 and China’s Type 99A share a fundamental difference in combat philosophy from the Abrams. Both utilize a 125mm main gun fed by an autoloader, reducing the crew to three men. This allows for a lower profile and lighter weight (50 tons to the Abrams’ 70), but it makes these changes in exchange for the acceptance of a few fatal flaws.
The Russian reliance on the carousel autoloader stores ammunition directly in the crew compartment. Once a penetrating hit detonates that ammunition, the crew and tank are instantly destroyed, typically with the turret being cast into the air like a toddler throwing a toy. This is referred to as the “Turret Toss Olympics” in the armor community.
The Abrams’ manual loader, combined with the isolated ammo compartment, mechanized pneumatic blast door and blowout panels, ensures that a similar hit usually leaves the crew alive. Furthermore, the lack of a fourth crew member in the T-90 and Type 99 degrades the crew’s ability to execute tasks like track maintenance, pull security, or manage fatigue during continuous operations.
The Allies
NATO allies’ design philosophy and doctrine tend to align closely with the United States and the Abrams, featuring heavily armored treaded dreadnoughts with four-man crews.
Germany’s Leopard 2A7V is the closest thing the Abrams has to a cousin. The M1’s 120mm cannon is a derivative of the same Rheinmetall gun used in the Leopard 2. The primary divergence between the two vehicles is their means of propulsion. The Leo uses a diesel powerpack rather than a gas turbine. The diesel is more fuel-efficient, but lacks the immediate, drag-strip torque and multi-fuel flexibility of the Abrams AGT1500 turbine.
The UK’s Challenger 2 is renowned for its focus on crew protection and survivability, which is shown in its development and implementation of their highly classified Dorchester armor. The Challenger 2 uses a 120mm rifled gun, but the Challenger 3 will be switching to a 120mm smoothbore cannon, just like the Leopard and the Abrams. This aligns their lethality doctrine directly with that of the USA and Germany, standardizing ammunition logistics across allied armor formations.
The Operator’s Perspective
Allow me to be crystal clear: while being a part of the Abram’s crew is the best job I ever had, it is by no means a walk in the park. It is brutally physically and mentally demanding. You are living, eating, and sleeping out of a mechanized steel coffin, manhandling 120mm tank rounds the size of an adult human leg that weigh 50 pounds each. The sheer kinetic toll of maintaining a 73-ton war wagon and its weapons is intensive to say the least.
The technology inside the SEPv3 is incredible, but it doesn’t make the work effortless. In fact, it just changes the nature of the difficulty. For the Tank Commander, the main challenge is command and control. He must process a massive influx of digital data from his JBC-P and radios while directing his tank and his crew.
The Gunner has to manage the advanced Fire Control Systems, toggle optics, laser targets and conduct fire commands under extreme pressure. The Loader does more than just slam rounds into the breech. They are the ultimate multitaskers who have to balance loading the gun/coax, managing the radios, manning his M240 and assisting the TC/gunner in target acquisition.
The Driver has to execute tactical maneuvers in a massive treaded vehicle from a reclined position with an incredibly limited field of view. This requires constant vigilance to avoid accidents, such as throwing a track or burying the tank in soft terrain.
Furthermore, the Army’s doctrinal shift from counterinsurgency back to Large Scale Combat Operations has been a hard transition for some. Retraining the muscle memory from urban patrols and route clearance to fast-paced, peer-on-peer armored maneuver warfare is a massive undertaking.
Conclusion
But at the end of the day, when the line-of-departure is crossed, the exhaustion fades away. The SEPv3 and its weapons are the absolute best in the world, and they are crewed by the best army in the world.
The Abrams stands as the ultimate refinement of a legendary machine. It is a 73-ton masterclass in firepower, protection, and maneuver warfare. That being said, no platform can defy the limits of physics forever.
Recognizing the unsustainable weight of constant bolt-on upgrades, the Army has pivoted toward the M1E3. Drawing inspiration from the recent AbramsX tech demo, this generation will shed tons in weight, embracing a hybrid-electric drive, unmanned turret, and built-in active protection to counter the drone and missile-saturated battlefields of the future.
Tomorrow will get here eventually, but until it does, we have today thoroughly taken care of. If a nation needs to shatter enemy lines and dominate the ground domain, the M1A2 SEPv3 is the undisputed best tool for the job. It is the sharpest tip of the longest spear, ensuring the nations who use it and the tankers who crew it will continue to dictate the terms of armored warfare for years to come.
Categories
1895 Chilean Mauser in 7x57mm
The Son & Heir and I were lucky enough to have gone to the War Museum. Where we saw this painting. It is of a huge size and very moving to see. As it really tell of the human cost of War.
By the way if you are in London, I can most highly recommend going to this place. It is just jammed packed with relics of all the wars that Britain has fought in. Also the Docents there are a fountain of information.
Categories
Marlin Model 39a
This is Chinese actor Deng Kai. In the huge hit drama Zhu Yu or, in English, Pursuit of Jade—which is terrific, you absolutely should watch it—he brilliantly plays a creepy, charismatic, obsessive stalker. Naturally, he is now being mobbed by female fans. This is the intense genetic “filter” of the Neolithic Y Chromosome Bottleneck continuing to have cultural consequences.
FromWikipedia:
The Neolithic Y-chromosome bottleneck refers to a period around 5000 BC where the diversity in the male y-chromosome dropped precipitously across Africa, Europe and Asia, to a level equivalent to reproduction occurring with a ratio between men and women of 1:17. Discovered in 2015, the research suggests that the reason for the bottleneck may not be a reduction in the number of males, but a drastic decrease in the percentage of males with reproductive success in Neolithic agropastoralist cultures, compared to the previous hunter gatherers.
The development of farming and then animal herding greatly increased the number of humans—which continued to have evolutionary consequences for our species—and created productive assets (farms and animal herds) worth fighting over. Successful male teams (typically organised as clans) wiped out unsuccessful male teams and took their women as spoils.
Hence, there is a dramatic bottleneck in male lineages but not in female lineages. This pattern stopped with the development of chiefdoms and especially states, though not so much on the Steppes, whose states were more like super-chiefdoms and where intense competition over resources (and women) continued.1
This had consequences. A major one is that the male expression of human genes became dramatically better at forming and maintaining teams—as there was drastic selection pressure for that—but the female expression of human genes did not.
This is why young schoolboy sporting teams regularly crush adult women’s national teams in team sports such as soccer. It is not that schoolboys have the strength advantage over women associated with adult men (they are often not particularly advantaged around age 14-15). It’s simply that human males are much more likely to “get” teamwork at a visceral level.
At least some of the differences in the statistical distribution of cognitive traits between men and women comes from this genetic bottleneck’s intense selection pressure differences. This is particularly clear in social patterns. For instance, men readily form hierarchies—often using physical cues such as height to do so.
Men focus on roles, suppressing or otherwise managing their emotions to do so. They regularly test each other—hence ragging each other, making appalling jokes, etc. Such mechanisms generate trust, as they test whether you will fold under pressure, whether one can say outrageous things and still get support. Hence the popular quip:
Men insult each other but they don’t mean it. Women compliment each other but they also don’t mean it.
Men roast each other as tests because so much male interaction is about teamwork, and the roles and reliability that requires, while women typically look to emotional connection. Given that the latter requires a lot of interaction to build up trust, yes, female friendships can be quite intense, but relations between human females can also be viciously unstable and fissile.
These differences have other social consequences. Men are notably more positive about free speech than women, because men often see speech as a test while women are more likely to see it as a threat. As universities have feminised, the male-female differences on free speech among students have become more pronounced. Men are systematically more tolerant of alternative points of view than are women.
Orwell’s famous comment in his novel 1984:
It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy.
Was a great novelist doing what great novelists do: noticing.
As part of the teamwork focus, men tend to be the social solidarity sex while women are not. Women are much less likely to have friends of lower socio-economic status than are men. For women, such friends are much less likely to be worth the emotional investment. For men, they may be useful members of a future team.
As institutions, occupations and public discourse become more feminised, there has been a shift in patterns of language. A massive study of patterns of language use found a dramatic shift since the 1980s, such that:
our results suggest that over the past decades, there has been a marked shift in public interest from the collective to the individual, and from rationality toward emotion.
All this means that male-dominated institutions and spaces will be generally better, often much better, at generating and managing feedback than female-dominated spaces. When people note that feminising institutions and occupations have a strong tendency to become less functional, it is precisely because they are worse at generating and managing feedback, and at generating and maintaining trust.
Lower trust, and the narrowing of acceptable feedback, encourages safety through conformity. Modern publishing, which is very strongly female-dominated displays such problems. The decline of the global reach of Hollywood has coincided with strong antipathy to employing white males and a rise in moralised conformity in its output.
As universities have become more feminised, they have also become more conformist.
That male physical risks revolve around (inanimate) things, and female physical risks revolve around appearance and pregnancy, is explicable in terms of differing reproductive strategies, particularly in a technological species—which we have been since our Australopithecine ancestors picked up stones to bash open skulls of the left-over kills of predators to scoop out the brains and to split bones to get at the marrow. See the NHS data on hospital admissions below.
This doesn’t mean women don’t engage in extremely physically dangerous activities outside of pregnancy: note how women dominate the “animal rider or animal drawn vehicle accident” category. These are overwhelmingly horse-riding injuries. Horses are expensive (“poverty is owning a horse” as the common horsebox sticker has it) and their ownership—in England especially—tends to be confined to the upper and middle-classes. The difference is that a horse is an intelligent mammal and so can be related to emotionally; an equally dangerous motorcycle cannot.2
Hollywood’s—and academe’s and publishing’s—antipathy to employing (straight) white males also means systematically excluding the demographic (striving males) most willing to take risks.
Hollywood’s leaching of originality—the endless remakes, sequels, prequels—goes with the conformist preaching that has been driving away viewers and (in the case of comics and fiction) readers. The surge in manga—and other East Asian entertainment products—is another consequence, as people switch to entertainment that takes story and character seriously, rather than the performative moralising the disfigures so much of the recent cultural output of the US and the rest of the Anglosphere.
So, not everything in male-female differences is about the Neolithic Y Chromosome Bottleneck, but some things are, precisely because it was such an intense—yet so lopsided—selection process.
While the Neolithic Y Chromosome Bottleneck did not notably affect female lineages, this obscures a different horror. Generations of women bred with a rapist who had helped kill all their male relatives. This has continuing consequences. All those romance novels and stories where a male brute is tamed by the love of a good woman hark back to this.
So does the well-known female fascination with “bad boys”. Imprisoned male serial killers generate female “fans”: criminal lawyers refer to it as hybristophilia. In more recent times, it’s become clear that some Western women are fascinated by Hamas and other jihadis, not despite them being ruthless killers, but because they are.
The notion that only men have toxic behavioural patterns is nonsense.
Which brings us back to Chinese actor Deng Kai being mobbed by (mainly female) fans after (brilliantly) playing a creepy, charismatic, obsessive stalker in a hit drama. Deng Kai is getting zealous fans not despite playing a charismatic villain, but because he has.
We like to imagine that we are free agents, unaffected by our genetic heritage. Yes, it’s true that we are the blankest slates in the biosphere, that we are the species least driven by genetically-implanted instincts. That is, however, very different from actually being blank slates.
We are the cultural species par excellence, creating ever more varied social niches. But our capacity to be cultural rests on our genetic capacities. Our genetic heritage is the substrate, the ever-present causal shadow underlying all that we do. Thus, children fare systematically better if they are raised by both biological parents than in stepfamilies, if adopted, or in single-parent families.
This genetic shadow thus includes the variation in our responses, and how much how our social patterns are driven by the statistical distribution of traits. Think, for example, how much violent crime is driven by a small, statistical “tail” of males—a tail whose size varies among human populations. How large that statistical “tail” is, and how well public policy deals with it, is fundamental to violent crime rates.
This genetic shadow extends to a Chinese actor who has been working in the industry since 2018 suddenly mobbed because of a role in a drama broadcast in March 2026 that by mid-April was already close to 3bn views.
We all know that good genes can help acting careers. But our genes, our genetic heritage, are not innocent in our reactions to actors and their performances.
We are a story-driven species precisely because our genes not only enable us to be a social, linguistic and cultural species, they help shape how we are such a species. This includes disturbing reasons for the shapes we’ve formed.
This paper attempts to explain the extreme narrowing of surviving male lineages by the adoption of patrilineal systems and polygyny. While the shift to patrilineal systems in itself does increase unequal lineage success—as does polygyny—much of the point of the shift to patrilineality was precisely that warriors who grow up together are better warrior teams.
Moreover, there is considerable evidence of violence after the shrinkage of male lineages dramatically slowed—and then reversed—with the development of chiefdoms, and especially states. These suppressed violence, but not patrilineality or polygyny. In many societies, polygyny actually intensified with the rise of states.
The bottleneck effects continued to echo down populations. The extraordinary reproductive success of particular male lineages is associated either with pastoralist violence and conquest and/or early state creation. Further, the notion that the majority of male lineages just passively accepted their reproductive exclusion flies in the face of a huge amount of evidence—especially as the examples of very successful pastoral lineages occurred in societies with notoriously high levels of violence, including as raiders, such as across the Steppes and in Ireland.
Moreover, polygyny is associated with higher rates of violence, single-spouse marriage with higher social cohesion. Nor was the creation and maintenance of states typically a peaceful process: periodic violent peaks in Chinese history, for example, were extraordinary.
It was precisely the creation of a reproductively-excluded underclass that provided so much of the impetus for the banditry and mass peasant revolts that are such a feature of Chinese history. So, while patrilineality and polygyny were definitely factors in the wildly differentiated success rates of male lineages, considerable levels of violence and contestation over resources and women—that selected in favour of male teamwork—were clearly also very much in play.
Until the invention of the stirrup, women probably enjoyed an advantage over men when it came to horsemanship. It is notable that a pastoralist civilisation (the Mongols) remedied this disadvantage.
References
Ali Akbari, Annabel Perry, Alison R. Barton, et al. ‘Ancient DNA reveals pervasive directional selection across West Eurasia,’ Nature (2026). https://reich.hms.harvard.edu/sites/reich.hms.harvard.edu/files/inline-files/2026_Akbari_Nature_selection_0.pdf
Patricia Balaresque, Nicolas Poulet, Sylvain Cussat-Blanc, Patrice Gerard, Lluis Quintana-Murci, Evelyne Heyer & Mark A. Jobling, ‘Y-chromosome descent clusters and male differential reproductive success: Young lineage expansions dominate Asian pastoral nomadic populations,’ European Journal of Human Genetics, January 2015. https://www.nature.com/articles/ejhg2014285
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Judith K. Brown, ‘A Note on the Division of Labor by Sex,’ American Anthropologist, Vol.72, Issue 5, October 1970, 1073-1078. https://www.jstor.org/stable/671420
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